Google to Distribute Image Ads, Plans Email List Service

comforteagle writes "For the next shot in the search engine advertising war Google has launched image ads in addition to their popular text AdSense program. From Google's explanation page: 'Image ads will show in rotation with text ads. On a page by page basis, Google's technology determines whether text ads or image ads are likely to make you more money, and serves the best ads to your page.'" Another reader writes: "eWEEK.com is reporting that Google has begun testing a new mailing list service, Google Groups 2, sure to go head-to-head with Yahoo Groups. It eventually will replace what is today only a Usenet archive. Users of the new beta can start their own mailing lists (public or private) and in typical Google fashion, it is promising to put search front and center (even hinting at postings being included in Web search one day)."

Ok...

[jargoone]

Sounds fair to me. Unlike the text ones, they're blockable, too, for those who aren't interested.

Re:Here we go again?

[Pxtl]

Yes, it is good for them, but I still don't like it. One of the larges reasons I switched over to Google in the first place, besides its effectiveness, was its lightweight page. Google is my homepage partially because it loads really damn fast. It searches really damn fast. Images are slow. This is, to me, one of Google's main selling points. Ergo, this sucks.

Click more text ads ...

[kabz]

If they have some kind of algorithm for selecting whether to show text or graphics ads (as the summary implies) ... maybe clicking a few text ads once in a while will let the system know that you aren't interested in the graphic ads.

Lets hope they don't correlate this with search history. (X10 ads aplenty, here I come :-( )

Too much, too quickly?

[andrew_j_w]

I hope the people at Google know what they're doing... it would seem to me that for a company that has been so focused on providing an excellent search engine they're suddenly branching out very quickly (Mailing lists, Gmail...).

I wonder if this has anything to do with their impending IPO?

Standard Procedure

[MSittig]

Here goes...

nano .mozilla/default/chrome/userContent.css

IMG[SRC =*"/adsense/"] { display: none ! important }

C-x y

At least on Slashdot I can subscribe to scrub the ads.

Re:Google Faith

[Liselle]

Well, we finally got a Google topic, that's a good start. ;)

I can't speak for anyone else, but I have no "faith" in Google. I just haven't been let down yet. If they ever trip, I'll be using another search engine quick as you can blink. That's what Google did to Altavista/etc, and what someone else will do to them if they don't stay smart.

What about the unsenet archive?

[oohp]

I find the usenet archieve pretty cool as you can read and especially search usenet newsgroups without subscribing.

On the other hand I haven't found a way to read newsgroups with mozilla. Maybe that;s because I don't know what to fill the server field with and if a group I'm interested in is on that server.

Google Groups... sounds familiar...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the new google groups concept sound familiar to anyone else who remembers dejanews? (which google bought for the news content, etc).. didnt they try that?

Detecting when a text ad works better?

[Andy_R]

When will they detect that I will NEVER click an ad, and I actively avoid companies that intrusively advertise (and I have a very tight definition of intrusive!).

I was fairly neutral to eBay until I saw userfriendly.org on someone else's manchine and saw it looks like a big flashing eBay advert with a tiny comic in the middle, and I was mildly impressed with Honda until they interrupted the Formula 1 coverage of their own car doing well to show me an advert.

It's in advertisers interests not to lose potential customers by annoying them.

Google would have a real market advantage if they could show that their adverts were going to people who do not block every ad they can, or they targetted less intrusive versions of adverts at people like me who do.

Google providing description about images

[kyoko21]

Well, google may be rolling out a new form of ad delivery, but at least they are allowing people to know what to look for. The following is taken from their Adsense Beta page describing the sizes of the images:

"Google image ads are currently in beta and are available in 4 major formats: 468x60, 728x90, 120x600, and 300x250"

The good things now you can put these sizes into your content blocker. Unless you are like me, who is blocking every 2x2, 2x3, 3x2, 3x3 length integer names in the file names of jpgs and gifs, then you wouldn't have anything to worry about.

Oh yeah, don't forget about the 1x1, and the clear, and transparent gifs and jpegs, too.

Re:Google Faith

[mirko]

S'cuse me, what did av.com to you ?
I still happen to use it because I *love* its query language...
But I don't like the fact the Search input text in Safari cannot be pointed to send the query anywhere else than Google.*
However good is Google, I do not want it to rule my (e-)life.

Re:Bandwidth concerns for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I suppose if people don't like it, they can stop using Google, or any of its services. Seems pretty cut and dried to me. At the moment, Google doesn't owe me, or anyone else, squat.

Ugh, more stupidity coming up from my customers.

[Seng]

I work at a company that hosts a huge number of websites for newspapers around the US. Enough of them already have become a PITA because the publishers think Google AdSense will bring good money to their site, and have inundated us with requests to add the damn javascript to their pages. (God forbit someone at the papers learn how to edit a friggin HTML file and insert a in it!!!) The funny thing is, these ads often compete against the newspapers themselves! I've seen ads show up that say "Why bother advertising in newspaper classifieds when you can advertise with us?" LOL... Too rich. Now, it's going to be, "How come my right side of the web page keeps stretching from it's normal size" - not paying any attention that this 400x300 pixel monster is taking up real estate on the page now.

Re:Fear and loathing.

[isopossu]

Usenet was born to the Internet culturally completely different from the Net today. Practically everybody wrote with their own names. There were practically no non-academic readers.

The point is: those who wrote the usenet messages years ago thought they were read by only a few people, quite friendly and civilized ones, and that the messages were forgotten in weeks when the news server washed the old messages.

Now these often rather intimate and open discussions can be browsed by anybody anywhere. Just type a name and all you've written will come out.

Maybe some think the Usenet archive has a reason not to exist anymore.

Uh...

[faust2097]

Hey, does anyone else keep getting a little frustrated with the fact that Google seems hell-bent on introducing new services [orkut, gmail, etc.] but they haven't really done anything about the fact that 'optimizers' have basically cracked PageRank?

I worked at AltaVista in 1999, when I started there they were the dominant search engine and the #4 site on the internet. They made the same mistake of taking their search engine business for granted and pursuing a bunch of other non-related features. Guess what happened? A tiny little company came out of nowhere that had clearly superior search results and completely ate AV's lunch. That company? Google.

Now Google doesn't have Rod Schrock and his Harvard B-School crew of useless cronies at the helm so they do have a chance at being successful but they'd be best off focusing their efforts on their core business.

Is Google killing USENET?

[Allen Zadr]

I'm always hearing from trolls about how BSD is dying, always with a follup from several happy BSD users.

Well, the idea that Google is planning to replace it's USENET archive with a web groups engine. So, is USENET dying? Or, more appropriately perhaps, will Google's dropping of USENET archiving contribute to a USENET death?

In reality, I don't believe that they are actually going to drop the USENET archiving -- I just think they are likely to make it slightly harder to find. Either way, USENET use has declined significantly over the last several years, I can only see this helping to make it worse.

Re:Google: I hope you don't screw this up.

[jalefkowit]

"I mean, yeah, Profitability is somewhat of a mandatory thing (duh!) and there isn't alot of "paying" to google for it's services outside of advertising."

This is what happens to companies when they go public.

Profitability is indeed a mandatory thing for any business. As we know from Google's IPO filing, though, the text-only ads were already quite profitable.

So why change? Because for a public company, just being "profitable" isn't enough -- they now have an obligation to maximize profit.

In a private business, you can make the decision that "we could probably make more money in the short term by accepting graphical ads, but that's just not our style." In a public company you don't get to make those decisions any more -- if you try to, the shareholders throw you out and replace you with a clueless Haaaahvahd MBA with Executive-Style Hair who is more than happy to run the business into the ground to hit a quarterly revenue target.

Google's founders have attempted to mitigate this somewhat in their filing by giving themselves, essentially, super-shareholder status -- their shares carry ten times the voting weight of an average shareholder's. But that's a defensive measure; it doesn't change the fact that the underlying dynamics of the company have changed. The founders are reacting to direction from outside, now. It will be interesting to see what other "great ideas" the outsiders have up their sleeves...

Groups

[ignatzMouse]

My big concern with the direction that they are going in is the fragmentation of their product.

Yahoo is very good at having a unified service. Mail gets you into groups gets you into their customized maps. The core Yahoo ID is used by everything. (Their use of [e-mail] for their email was a brilliant marketing idea giving you a stake in the company.)

Blogger, orkut, groups2, all have components with similar datasets. Users, email, profiles. Each of these products is growing and the longer that they wait to create a unified core the harder it will be to do it at all.

They have so many brilliant people taking them in so many directions somebody is going to need to reign it all in.

Re:Detecting when a text ad works better?

[skiflyer]

Guess what... they know this, marketting departments the world over have spent millions in research. You (and all those who claim to be advertisment adverse) are such a small demographic that they don't care... and even if they did, the truth is most people who are advertistment adverse simple disregard ads, they don't actually write the company off.

So in other words, no harm done if you don't click on the ad.

One thing we all seem to forget, ads are out there because they make people money, simple as that. Now, I'm all for the arguments against deceptive advertising (i.e. looks like an OS or anti-virus warning), but really, you say right in your message...

I will NEVER click an ad

so then, why should they bother catering to you in anyway?

Re:Headline: Public doesn't RTFA

[base3]

But read carefully: At this time, we won't show image ads on Google. Be dead certain that within a short time after the IPO, it'll be blinking flash ad, punch the monkey, pop-up city on Google. Unless you pony up for a subscription.

google groups good

[muckdog]

yahoo recently ticked me off by changing the search in yahoo groups. You can no longer search all the old group message (for one group) at once via the web interface. It will only search like 50 at one time and then you have to run the search again. This is worthless on any high volume groups. It a good thing I keep my mail archived so I can still do the search on my computer.

Re:Obnoxious Google Groups terms

[harmonica]

Google may, in its sole discretion, modify or revise these terms and conditions at any time by updating this web page, and you agree to be bound by these modifications or revisions.

Isn't that illegal? You can't agree to something you haven't seen. So they could retroactively charge 10 USD per article viewed? That's ridiculous.